Don McLean Quotes

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.

When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.

I've had a wordless phase, and that's still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.

One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.

I've always tried to avoid music being direct therapy, and I've always found there's a power when you write something that can have its own interpretation - although I'm not being intentionally evasive.

I sometimes never really realize what lyrics are saying.

People are always reading things into the films.

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

Some people try and tell you what the songs are about and it bores me to death.

I think in some ways, it can do a listener a disservice to explain a song. I think I'd rather leave a little room for people to put themselves in it.

The play is not in the words, it's in you!

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

I think my films are always political, even if I don't put explicitly political things in them.

It's amazing what some people read into songs.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

'Simply the Best' has always been one of my favourite songs and a song that I've always thought was far deeper than what you imagine it to be at first listen. I found the lyrics to be really, oddly beautiful, considering you rarely stop and think about them.

Because of my song 'Sam Stone,' a lot of people thought I was interested in writing protest songs. Writing protest songs always struck me as patting yourself on the back.

I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.

Art is observing society around you, representing it through your eyes.

I love having those lyrics that at first make you think it's about one thing, but it's really about something so much more.